"We Have a Language Problem Here:" Linguistic Identity in East Africa
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2009
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
East Africa is home to incredible linguistic diversity. Indigenous
languages, African linguas franca, and imperial languages foster a social
landscape with diverse linguistic identities. Kiswahili and English are
fixtures across East Africa, each bringing constructed histories to
overlapping speaker populations: a web of language attitudes that is
wrapped in the social and cultural history of the people of East Africa. The
following work examines linguistic identities through interviews that I
conducted during the summer of 2008 in Kenya and Tanzania.
Contemporary linguistic identity is informed by a discussion of lexical
change in Kiswahili – loan words from Arabic and English – just one
observable change in the history of the language with an impact on
Swahili identity. The paper begins with a discussion of the Kiswahili
lexicon and lexical borrowing in Kiswahili as a way to concretize
subsequent discussions of linguistic identity. I follow with a discussion of
research methods and practices before analyzing key interviews. The study
of identity is necessarily qualitative, and this paper aims to problemetize
concepts of linguistic identity in modern East Africa by detailing the
language attitudes of a small group of respondents from across the region.
Identity in East Africa is mutable, and individuals constantly navigate
social and ethnic spaces through strategic uses of language. Here all
language use is political, a reflection of power with real world
consequences.